The education of an oyster farmerhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/the-education-of-an-oyster-farmer
If you want to run a successful oyster farm, you need to develop a taste for eating raw oysters.My brother, Adam, and I grew up working summers on our family's oyster farm on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. In between a few epic mud fights, we picked oysters, dug clams and learned a lot about the tides, hard work and the proper use of sunscreen. But when we took over managing the farm five years ago, we found we didn't know nearly enough.

Our education started out on the beach. To grow consistently great oysters, you have to know where they fatten best, how their flavor varies with growing location, and where they'll be most protected from floods and ravenous starfish. Considering that the farm is 10 feet underwater half the time, learning the geography of our beach was -- and continues to be -- a challenge.

Our biggest shortcoming, though, was culinary: We had never eaten raw oysters before. On Hood Canal, where our farm is located, the food culture calls for oysters fried, barbecued and maybe stewed, but definitely not raw. To the great confusion of tourists, it's easier to find a Hood Canal oyster served on the half-shell in New York City than on the Hood Canal.

Since most of our restaurant customers serve oysters raw, we needed to develop raw oyster chops in a hurry. This is easier said than done. Oyster flavors are fickle and occasionally counterintuitive. Ostreaphiles have created a lexicon to pin down these subtleties, but wield those words incorrectly and you're likely to sound silly. Waxing poetic about an oyster's intricate flavor, when all you're really getting is salt, makes you sound like a showoff.

At first, Adam sampled voraciously and divided oysters into two categories: those he could eat, and those he just couldn't. Later, he found some helpful beer analogies: If a Hama Hama, a Hood Canal Pacific oyster, is an amber, then a buttery Kumamoto is an easy-drinking pale ale, and a full-bodied Belon equals a salty stout.

Because eating oysters raw is fun and frequently involves champagne, I was a swift convert to the raw culture. But for a long while, I had no way to describe our oysters without describing our farm. I didn't taste oysters, I tasted moss hanging like a curtain from big leaf maple trees; I could also taste the green-blue cold of the river. Once I fully explored the tide flats, I loved the oysters even more for their strange intertidal home, populated by fierce, tiny creatures, where the moon has agency and humans follow a curfew imposed by the incoming tide.

Eventually, Adam found descriptive words that worked for him -- musky, smooth, crunchy, creamy -- while I learned to let an oyster speak for itself. Oysters convert differences in salinity and nutrients into elusive flavors of melon, vegetables and earth. The brilliant thing about eating raw oysters is not that they reflect their environment, but that they give you a different way of experiencing it.

Five years ago, I blamed my community's lack of raw oyster culture on the relentless winter rain and our geography. Pinned between the mountains and the water, our only directional options are north or south, and I figured that gave us all tunnel vision. Now, I've concluded that my woodsy neighbors resist the raw oyster trend because they're already drenched, literally, in nature. A cooked oyster is a staple food, like pot roast. But a raw oyster is alive, and it speaks of the ocean. In order to listen, you need to chew. You'll get something otherworldly but also, in a strange and primeval way, familiar.

Our company is now a real-deal farm. We create, buy, nurse, plant and rotate seed in a quest to produce and sell only oysters that do justice to how much we love our farm. We?re happy as clams to be farming oysters. They require no fertilizer or feed, and they actively filter the water by removing excess nutrients. All you really need to grow oysters is clean water and a seed supply.

Unfortunately, reports from oyster hatcheries on the Pacific Coast say that ocean acidification is already interfering with seed production. Many species, farmed or not, will suffer in an acidified ocean, but oyster farmers stand to lose everything. For now, all we can do is to spread the raw oyster gospel far and near: Eating raw, healthy oysters is the absolute best way to appreciate clean oceans. And when you consult a raw oyster about climate change, you learn that there's a world of wet at stake, not just an industry.

Lissa James is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She and her brother, Adam, run the Hama Hama Oyster Company in Lilliwaup, Washington.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryWriters on the Range2012/02/08 14:45:00 GMT-7ArticleBrushed asidehttps://www.hcn.org/issues/41.14/brushed-aside-1
On Washington's Olympic Peninsula, the once-lucrative floral greens industry is floundering as its immigrant workers face deportation.On a cold weekday morning in mid-November, three Hispanic men stand behind a hedge at the Forest Service's Quilcene Ranger Station, waiting to buy permits to harvest floral greens in the Olympic National Forest. A white unmarked Bronco screeches into the parking lot and a giant bald man gets out, wearing a plain white T-shirt, jeans and two pistols at his belt. He surprises the men and asks, in Spanish, "Are you from Guatemala?" They run, but he grabs one by the arm. The bald man identifies himself as a U.S. Border Patrol officer, asks the Guatemalan if he wants to fight, forces him into the back seat of the Bronco, and drives off.

It's the second time in three months that the Border Patrol has arrested suspected illegal immigrants at this ranger station on permit day. In the past, as many as 200 people have shown up at the bimonthly lottery to buy the 50 permits available. But at the November lottery, the Forest Service sold only a dozen or so -- mostly to women protected from arrest by the babies on their hips.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, non-timber resources such as mushrooms, evergreen boughs, floral greens and specialty woods have long been harvested for profit. In the 1980s, however, the harvest boomed as global markets opened up and Hispanics joined the workforce. For decades, "brush" wholesalers relied on abundant immigrant labor to stay competitive in a global floral market, while immigrants flocked to the industry because it didn't require English language skills or legal documents. By some estimates, the brush industry now generates around $250 million a year in Oregon and Washington, mainly through sales of floral greens and evergreen boughs. Most of the big wholesale brush sheds are located around south Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula, where easy access to markets combines with the perfect temperature and forest type for growing salal, a woody understory shrub that is the poster species for the floral greens industry. If you've ever received a bouquet of roses, chances are good that it contained salal picked from forests on the Olympic Peninsula by an immigrant from Mexico or Guatemala.

For the most part, the immigrants and wholesalers, both fearful of more regulation and inspection, have kept a low profile. But now the increased Border Patrol presence has attracted public attention to the Peninsula's immigrant communities. And the recent immigration crackdown -- together with declining natural resources and a weakening economy -- has left both those immigrants and the industry itself facing an uncertain future.

After 9/11, the Bush administration pumped more money and manpower into efforts to secure the Canadian border. In 2001, there were only 340 Border Patrol agents along the entire Northern border; today, there are over 1,500. On the Olympic Peninsula, the number of agents increased dramatically after 2007, as Southern-border agents transferred to Port Angeles under a voluntary relocation program. Since then, the number of agents in Port Angeles has increased from four to 24.

Last August, the agency began conducting random checkpoints on major highways at the north end of the Peninsula. The intensity of the checkpoints took residents by surprise. Over the next two months, in five separate checkpoints, agents stopped nearly 5,000 vehicles and detained around two dozen people, including 15 suspected illegal immigrants. In September, an 18-year-old Forks High School honor student and wrestling star named Edgar Ayala was detained at a checkpoint and deported to Mexico, where he hadn't lived since he was a toddler.

Ayala's arrest sparked protests across the Peninsula. At a November town meeting in Chimacum, about 350 people showed up to protest the checkpoints. "Everybody (is) opposed to immigration stops because they're taking away our individual rights," says Mike Gurling, visitor's center manager for the Forks Chamber of Commerce. Last February, Congressman Norm Dicks, D-Wash., a member of the Homeland Security Committee, wrote a letter to Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, asking her to review the use of checkpoints. The checkpoints have stopped, at least for now.

But for undocumented immigrants on the Olympic Peninsula -- particularly in towns like Forks that have large immigrant populations -- the checkpoints are only part of the story. Immigrants have been detained in their homes, at gas stations, at traffic stops, at the Hispanic grocery store and out in the woods. According to Lesley Hoare, whose University of Washington master's thesis concerns the local immigrant community, at least 60 people have been arrested in Forks alone since last fall. Across the Peninsula, 187 people were detained by the Border Patrol last year, says Michael Bermudez, Border Patrol spokesman for the Blaine, Wash., sector.

----

And even as many immigrant families scramble to pay lawyers' fees and make bail for detained loved ones, the price of salal has tanked: The plant is worth half what it was a year ago. The decline is primarily due to the current recession, but according to Jim Freed, a non-timber forest product specialist with Washington State University, the heyday of the industry in the Northwest was already past; it hit its peak here in the early '90s. Since then, much of the land suitable for growing salal has been covered with houses. That's not all: Because Washington's timber industry has become increasingly dependent on small-diameter wood, many timber companies have shortened their harvest cycles from 90 years to around 50. As a result, salal has less time to get established in the understory. "In the old days," says Freed, "you'd pick an area once every five years. Now they're having to go back and pick the same areas over and over."

Several nonprofits have tried to encourage landowners and harvesters to work together to manage the land. The brush industry is normally "very tenuous for harvesters," says Freed, because they have "no easy access to land, and are at the mercy of regulators, law enforcement and wholesalers." In the late '90s, an Ilwaco-based nonprofit called Rainkist tried to market "green-certified" forest products in an attempt to prevent over-harvesting and put more money into the pockets of harvesters.

Invariably, these efforts fail because immigrant workers cannot gather in large groups or travel unnecessarily, much less participate in the broader economy, for fear of arrest and deportation. "If you want to do something about the environment," says Patricia Vasquez, who worked with brush pickers for the now-defunct immigrant advocacy nonprofit The Jefferson Center, "you need to get the workers involved, and you can't if they're always under pressure from Immigration."

At 8:30 on a rainy spring evening in Forks, Virgilio, a 22-year-old indigenous Guatemalan brush picker with an easy and enthusiastic smile, has just gotten home to the single-wide trailer he and his wife share with several other family members. In nearly eight hours of picking salal, he's earned $50. Speaking through an interpreter, Virgilio says that he came to Forks to join his family and pick brush nearly five years ago, and that neither the economic nor the immigration situation have ever been this bad. "People never know when they're going to get taken," he says. He estimates that half of the thousand or so Hispanics who lived in Forks before the raids started have since left town.

The number of students enrolled in the Quillayute Valley School District's bilingual education program is down 14 percent from last year. So many pickers have left Forks that last May, 70-year-old George "Hop" Dhooghe, the owner of a wholesale brush company called Olympic Evergreens, had trouble meeting his end-of-season orders. Dhooghe has worked in the brush industry all his life, mostly as a harvester. But when asked about the prospect of a greens industry without immigrant labor, he is dismissive: "It would be hard to get anybody to do the work," he says, "and if (salal) got too expensive, florists would move to other greens." This year, Dhooghe opened a brush-buying shed in Oregon, and says that "a lot of the people who used to pick for me here now pick down there."

Although there haven't been any checkpoints recently, Homeland Security continues to beef up security along the Canadian border. It's also moving ahead with construction of an enlarged Border Patrol station and temporary detention center in Port Angeles. In February, the county sheriff in Forks accepted a Homeland Security grant that requires deputies to more closely coordinate local law enforcement with the Border Patrol. The sheriff in neighboring Jefferson County refused the grant money, calling the collaboration requirement "unacceptable."

Meanwhile, local immigrants and their allies are continuing to organize anti-Border Patrol rallies and meetings. "Hopefully, out of the (public reaction to the) checkpoints, there will be integration of ways to monitor immigration enforcement," says Patricia Vasquez. Vasquez and other advocates hope that under the Obama administration, the Border Patrol will cease conducting raids, like those at the Quilcene Ranger Station, that specifically target illegal immigrants. "People have realized," says Jim Freed, "that we're spending a lot of money chasing down people who are otherwise minding their own business."

Despite the Border Patrol raids, poor brush prices and lack of good quality salal, Virgilio says he hopes to live in Forks forever. He's applied for amnesty because of gang wars back in Guatemala, and he and his wife have a baby son who is a U.S. citizen. Even though the work is hard, he says, it normally pays well. He'll just wait to see what happens next.

The author writes from Lilliwaup, Washington, where her family owns a tree farm.

This story was funded by a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

]]>No publisherCommunities2009/08/19 10:20:42 GMT-6ArticleWherever you go, there you arehttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/wherever-you-go-there-you-are
Lissa James learns about solitude in places as diverse as an apartment in downtown Paris and a ranch in rural Wyoming.I lived alone in Paris for six months when I was 20. Technically, I had a roommate, an 80-year-old Frenchwoman who'd helped her father smuggle Jews out of the city during the Nazi occupation. She took in boarders to help pay the rent on her Latin Quarter apartment, and I was just one in a long string of American students.

Most evenings I spent alone in my bedroom. I felt lonely and awkward because I hadn't made any French friends, and I was too cash-strapped to take advantage of the city's nightlife. Yet I never felt bored. I spent the evenings reading French novels, listening to French pop music and writing in my journal. During the day, I'd go to classes and then wander around, seeing words on billboards and in storefronts that I'd read in a novel or had heard on the radio. My thinking seemed clear and uncluttered; new ideas came easily and unexpectedly.

Only lately have I come to believe that that the feeling I had in Paris -- that my mind was completely alive -- was caused by more than just the stimulation of living in a foreign city. I think that my sense of mental clarity was made possible by my solitude. What I mistook for loneliness was actually aloneness: a period of reflection, heightened observation and, I'd like to believe, greater insight.

I started thinking about the difference between aloneness and loneliness while visiting my friend V, who works as a caretaker on a ramshackle ranch in northwestern Wyoming, more than 10 miles from the nearest paved road. The ranch consists of a cluster of 10 or so log cabins, with no plumbing or electricity. With the exception of a satellite telephone and a small solar panel, it could be a time capsule from the 1940s. I arrived with the spring thaw, just as three feet of snow began to soften.

Each morning during my stay, V cooked a breakfast of bacon, eggs and sourdough pancakes made with the ranch's 50-year-old sourdough starter. We spent the days chopping firewood, skiing, pitching loose hay from wooden cribs to the ranch's four horses, and talking. In the evenings, she made dinner on a cook stove that burned wood.

Her two-room cabin, built of lodgepole pine with wood chinking, smelled of wood smoke, leather and propane. Next to her bed, three homemade banjos hung above vats of brewing dandelion wine. Shelves along the walls held photo albums, Western songbooks and guides to veterinary medicine and medicinal herbs. Next to the bench sat a foot-operated sewing machine and a half-finished Decker packsaddle.

We had lots to talk about: grizzly bears, men, how to preserve elk meat, the nature of happiness and her 12 years on the ranch, half of it spent living alone. She said all that solitude had brought her both bliss and sorrow, inspired songs and designs for jewelry, and given her time to play music and make horse tack.

I didn't stay long enough to slow down, or even to get much beyond my initial contradictory reactions. The silence made me uneasy, as did the lack of schedule, yet I delighted in the novelty of the place. V has learned to live in peace with the ranch's resident mouse population, but I was disgusted by the ubiquitous droppings. Finally, I was ashamed of my wastefulness compared to my friend's careful calculations of energy and garbage.

Most of all, my stay made me aware of how I spend my time. I noticed that I stayed occupied to avoid the terrifying prospect that I'd be alone with myself. I know that my fear of being alone is a human trait, that for centuries we've used ostracism and solitary confinement as punishment. At the same time, don't we turn to solitude to achieve deeper spirituality and wisdom?

It wasn't until I remembered my time in Paris, and how turning inward had helped me understand the outside world and feel more aware, that I began to understand what my friend meant when she talked about needing long stretches of solitude.

"Most people aren't brave enough to try being alone," she said "Once you learn who you are, you find you can't run away from yourself."

Lissa James is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She writes from Lilliwaup, Washington, where she works for the family's oyster farm.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssays2009/01/15 13:31:04 GMT-7ArticleTreehuggers and treecutters unitehttps://www.hcn.org/issues/362/17456
Environmentalists have been working with Washington
foresters to keep small tree farms in business, but the treaty
between the two remains a fragile one.Walking
through a 250-acre parcel of his family's land on a snowy December
morning, Steve Stinson passes from a stand of young trees into a
forest of century-old Douglas fir, their trunks rising from a
tangle of bracken fern and salal. Along the trail, Stinson points
out several snags pockmarked by the holes of pileated woodpeckers.

The Stinson family property is progressive forestry
incarnate: mixed-age forests, plenty of standing dead trees for
bird and bug habitat, and 7- to 20-acre clear-cuts replanted with a
variety of tree species. Industrial timber companies, farming trees
as if they were corn, typically harvest 38-year-old Douglas fir
monocrops; the Stinsons don't cut until their trees are 80 years
old. The family owns nearly 1,200 acres in southwestern
Washington's Lewis County, making it a "small forest landowner"
under Washington state law.

Small tree farms like the
Stinsons' encompass some of the most environmentally sensitive land
in the state: low-lying areas close to streams and rivers. But
rising property values and stagnating timber prices often tempt
these landowners to sell out, opening their land to the subdivision
knife. And small foresters are hampered by environmental
restrictions originally designed to help the timber industry
navigate the Endangered Species Act.

Now, the threat of
forests disappearing under exurbia has brought some traditional
adversaries - environmentalists and the small foresters - to the
same table. Together, they've succeeded in convincing the state
Legislature to tinker with the regulations in a way that could help
keep the foresters on the land. But as the foresters ask for more,
the environmentalists are beginning to have doubts.

The problem surfaced in 1999, when it became
clear that a landmark rule designed to protect endangered salmon
habitat would have a significant economic impact on small tree
farms. The Forests and Fish Rules, which will regulate logging on
private land in Washington until 2055, give the timber industry
immunity from lawsuits over damage done by logging to endangered
salmon habitat. In exchange, loggers must increase the size of the
buffer zones they leave around fish-bearing streams. But because
small landowners are more likely to own land in easy-to-access
river valleys, the new streamside regulation hit them harder than
it did the industrial companies, which mainly own land in the
foothills.

Up until last September, small landowners had
to file Forest and Fish permit applications every two years. Since
few small landowners are well-versed in the scientific side of
forestry, they had to hire consultants to fill out the hefty
applications. That could cost thousands of dollars, and more if
streams, new roads, or threatened or endangered species were
involved, says forester Jack Kleinhoff. Now, thanks to the recent
push in the Legislature, small landowners only have to apply every
15 years - a seemingly small change that has some wide-ranging
repercussions. It gives those landowners one less barrier to
staying in business, and regulators hope that taking the long view
will help them do a better job managing their forests. "We want
people to think, 'Do I want that road for just one harvest, or is
it in the proper location to be able to access many harvest
locations?' " says Mary McDonald, manager of the state's Small
Forest Landowner Office. Rick Dunning, executive director of the
Washington Farm Forestry Association, hopes that hundreds of
long-term permits will be approved this year.

Small
landowners first started working on the long-term permits in 2002,
but the plan picked up momentum when the environmentalists got on
board. "Our support (for the long-term permits) is what gave them a
green light," says Peter Goldman, executive director of the
Washington Forest Law Center. The state's environmentalists, says
Goldman, "all want to see small forest landowners succeed and be
able to conduct viable forestry." That's a big change from 10 years
ago, says Rick Dunning, when "environmentalists didn't want us to
cut a tree."

The treatybetween
landowners and environmentalists, however, has hit a snag as
foresters look for more regulatory leniency. In addition to
managing his family's property, Steve Stinson is the executive
director of the Family Forest Foundation, which has spent 10 years
and nearly $4 million of private, state and federal funding
developing the nation's first multi-species, multi-landowner
Habitat Conservation Plan. If approved by the federal government,
the plan would allow landowners on 130,000 acres in Lewis County to
harvest more trees next to streams, but increase the restrictions
on upland logging. So far, says Stinson, the support from the
environmental community for the new plan has been "tepid." "The
naysayers," he says, "worry this will unravel Forests and Fish."

And it might not do any good, anyway. Becky Kelley,
campaign director for the Washington Environmental Council, says
it's too simplistic to blame the regulations when land is converted
from forestry to development. The average small-forest landowner is
in his 60s, looking ahead to retirement, estate taxes and health
care bills. "The conversation that doesn't happen," says Kelley,
"is, 'Aren't they going to convert anyway? And how can we address
these other problems?' "

The cooperation that went into
the long-term permits, says Kirk Hanson, regional director for
Northwest Certified Forestry, "may have just been a flash in the
pan." But the pressure on the area's forests is bound to increase:
The population of the Puget Sound region is expected to grow by
half again by 2040. Environmentalists and small landowners "will
end up on the same page someday," says Rick Dunning, "because we
both want the same things."

For a look at what both sides
don't want, one need only make the short drive from the Stinson
family forest to Chehalis, Wash., where, says Stinson, "they're
paving over the floodplain." Indeed, in December, as major floods
washed across the region, the Chehalis Wal-Mart made regional news:
It ended up 10 feet underwater.

The author
writes from Lilliwaup, Washington, where her family owns a tree
farm.

]]>No publisherWildlifeWashingtonArticleWater does move uphill toward moneyhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/17102
Lissa James figures that, with so many other
get-rich-quick schemers exploiting the West’s need for water,
she should have no problem selling her new book, How to Turn
Catastrophe into Cash. Now that I'm out of college, I
thought it was time to ask my elders for advice about investing in
the stock market. They must have seen how confused I looked,
because a week later, an investment letter arrived that promised to
answer all my questions, and, incidentally, make me rich, fast.

The letter featured a Nevada water company that's
guaranteeing to make millions by pumping rural water to Las Vegas.
The identity of the water company was not disclosed; to get the
real skinny, I had to pay $49.50 to the creators of the newsletter.
That's more money than I wanted to spend, but as I read the
newsletter, a novel idea occurred to me: Just as the people who got
rich during the Gold Rush were merchants, the people getting rich
from Nevada's water deals won't be small-time investors but those
who enable them. That led me to comb through the newsletter to
decipher what made it tick, and I'm happy to share with you –
for free! – the gist of what I learned:

This may come as no surprise, but many of us are greedy. The Nevada
water come-on promises that investors will "pocket 381 percent in
the short run." This may sound too good to be true, but people want
to believe.

All of us are bored. Create excitement about
your investment by making it seem dangerous. The Nevada water
solicitation does this perfectly by telling potential investors
that tensions in rural Nevada are so high, "ranchers are toting
rifles." The image of gun-toting ranchers reminds people of the
Wild West, a region practically built by speculators. Reporting
that the Arizona Republic "calls it a classic Western showdown"
will make the historical connection clear, and since no one knows
what "it" is, they can't prove you've misquoted anything.

Investors yearn to feel smart. Play up the secrecy
surrounding the deal by telling your readers that they're part of
an elite group that includes politicians and executives. Include
quotations from well-respected publications to create an air of
authority, which then allows you to be vague on details like dates
and names. Another tactic is to choose words that sound like
they're part of a lexicon. Examples include like "a mountain of
cash hitting the books" and referring to Wall Street as simply "The
Street." Your readers will feel so smart they won't bother to
double-check the information you do give them.

Nobody
wants to know the downsides. The creators of the water investment
guide never once mention the birds, fish and other animals whose
habitat is threatened by groundwater pumping, or the rural areas
that will dry up and blow away. They tell us that Nevada is one of
the driest places on earth, but only so that we understand that
water is valuable. They also mention that "city planners are
fighting to quench the growing population," but notice how cleverly
this is written: Are the city planners trying to control growth or
enable it? It's fine to create ambiguities, as your audience will
interpret them however it desires.

Most of us feel
helpless. Make the deal seem like it's inevitable, and you will
encourage this sensation of helplessness, which most people feel
anyway when faced with environmental catastrophes. The water
come-on includes water-transfer permit numbers, reassures us that
all environmental impact plans have been approved, and guarantees
that all the wells and infrastructure for transferring the water
are already in place. It even quotes a county engineer's office on
the progress of the pipeline (although it doesn't bother to specify
which county, (see principles #3 and #4). This final principle is
designed to win over anyone who suspects that pumping water from
rural Nevada to fill suburban swimming pools is a terrible scheme;
not worth supporting financially. The goal is to get them to figure
that since they can't stop it, they might as well benefit from it.
(This ties in nicely with Principle #1; People are greedy.)

I was so inspired by this get-rich-quick
scheme that I've written my own book, "How to Turn Catastrophe into
Cash," which will provide you with all the information you need to
make big bucks during drought, hurricanes, floods and the global
climate change that's predicted to cause deadly heat waves
throughout the West. Don't be a victim; exploit what's coming! Mail
me a check for $19.99, and get started getting rich.

Lissa James is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org.) She waits to get rich while
working on her family's oyster farm in Lilliwaup,
Washington.]]>No publisherWaterWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleChristmas fuels the 'bough industry' in
Washingtonhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/16773
The writer tells how Christmas has fueled a "bough
industry" in the forest When my parents were first
married, my father wanted to name their newly created logging
company "Moonscape Logging." Thankfully, my mother nixed that idea,
although it was an apt description of the clear-cutting that
happened on Washington's Olympic Peninsula in the '70s and '80s.
Once logs were taken out of the forest, whatever remained got
burned. Burning an old-growth clear-cut got rid of slash —
the tangle of worthless leftover branches that makes replanting
difficult.

Nowadays, loggers still burn small piles of
slash but leave most of the branches on the ground, where they help
replenish the soil and provide homes for animals. But these days,
an ever-increasing demand for holiday decorations is changing that,
too, and my father is tickled to find that he can effortlessly make
money by selling branches he used to sweat to get rid of.

This year, my family's Christmas bonus arrived in October, when
Guillermo, a Mexican immigrant, contacted my dad and arranged to
harvest cedar boughs off the property. The next day, Guillermo's
crew went to work. The crew was made up of six to eight people, all
immigrants, who smiled toothy smiles and waved as we drove past.

Occasionally we'd hear them speaking to one another in
Spanish as they worked in the woods surrounding the house. One of
them would climb a cedar tree, sometimes going as high as 100 feet
without a safety rope, all the while carrying a machete to hack off
the tree's branches. At the base of the tree, other workers sorted
through the fallen branches, removing the fragrant tips and tying
them into bundles. They stacked the neat bundles of greenery, ready
to be made into holiday swags, in the wide spot where my father
used to pile logs. Every few days a giant truck would come and haul
off a load of cedar boughs.

Soon, all up and down my
parents' driveway, you could see partially shaven cedar trees,
their trunks prickly with stubby branches, their tops green and
weepy. The harvesters leave the top third of the branches, enough
so that the tree suffers only temporary ill effects from its
haircut.

There's good money for everyone involved in the
"bough industry," which, at the harvesting phase of it, is
underground and everywhere in the forests. My dad earned 5 cents
for every pound of cedar greenery taken off the property.
Amazingly, that's as much as he gets for every pound of raw cedar
log he sells to a nearby mill.

Guillermo, who was the
crew's foreman and agent, also earned 5 cents a pound, for a total
of about $5,000. The workers earned 13 cents for every pound they
picked, which, according to Guillermo, works out to about $250 or
$300 a day. That may be good money, but it's a long, cold day of
work and dangerous for the tree-climbers. We received 36 inches of
rain in November, the woods were soaking wet and temperatures
dropped below freezing. Guillermo told my dad he sometimes keeps
his crew warm by doling out shots of tequila.

About a
month into their work on my dad's property, the crew left to
harvest boughs from a 40-acre forest before it was clear-cut. They
were in a hurry to get that job done before the trees were felled,
and before the Christmas market dried up. They returned on the
Saturday before Thanksgiving to finish up cedar trees in my
parents' front yard. It was the first time they'd worked in sight
of the house. One of the men climbed into the tree while the other
five people, including one woman and — unusually — a
child, worked around its base. My mom's mini-dachshunds, upset
about seeing strangers working so close to the house, went through
periodic, maniacal barking fits.

I'd come over to help my
mom clean before a holiday party, but we ended up spending most of
our time sitting on the couch, reading through the magazines we
were preparing to recycle, and drinking tea. After about four hours
of working alongside the adults, the child, who looked about 8
years old, began making as much noise as the dogs. His crying was
eerie and wailing. His mother and the other workers ignored him.
The noise caught our attention while we wondered what to do. The
dogs grew silent, and for a while my mother and I watched the kid,
sprawled out in the middle of the driveway, bawling his misery and
boredom to the trees.

Lissa James is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). She is a
former intern for the paper who now lives in Lilliwaup,
Washington.

]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleCows versus condos -- Northwest stylehttps://www.hcn.org/issues/298/15511
Some say that Washington’s Forests and Fish rules
could be so hard on small timber farms that the owners are likely
to sell out to development, to the detriment of salmon and other
wildlifeLike ranches elsewhere in the West, small tree farms
in Washington encompass some of the best fish and wildlife habitat:
lowland areas close to streams. An estimated 40,000 people
statewide own small tree farms that make up half of the
state’s 8 million acres of private forestland.

Yet
these small-scale timber operators had little say in negotiating
the Forests and Fish logging rules, says Kirk Hanson, of the
Department of Natural Resources’ Small Forest Landowner
Office, who owns a 40-acre tree farm himself. "The Forests and Fish
rules were industry-negotiated," he says. "Small forest landowners
were shoved to the side."

These landowners bear the brunt
of the Fish and Forest rules, say forestry experts. On average,
streamside buffers eat up 20 percent of the value of every timber
sale, but small landowners lose the most, because they’re
more likely to have land in valley bottoms crisscrossed with
streams. And the plan’s rules are so complicated that most
tree farmers have to hire professional foresters to fill out
cutting applications.

The proposed plan could make life
even harder, many small tree farmers argue, unless it contains
strong guarantees that timber harvesting can continue. And
what’s bad for tree farms may be bad for salmon, too. Small
landowners are under increasing pressure to sell to developers or
subdivide. According to the state Department of Natural Resources,
western Washington loses 88 acres of family forests a day —
or 50 square miles a year — to the kind of urban sprawl
that’s swallowing Puget Sound.

It’s the
Northwest’s version of the "cows versus condos" dilemma, in
which ranchers, pushed to the brink by global markets and tight
regulations, can net tremendous profits by selling their private
land to developers.

The Forests and Fish rules offer
small landowners some exemptions; they’re not required to
inventory fish-blocking culverts, for example. But those exemptions
make it more difficult for the federal government to track fish
kills and gauge the effectiveness of the rules, says Chris Mendoza,
a conservation biologist who works for both the timber industry and
environmentalists: "It’s another blank spot that makes it
difficult to quantify how much ‘take’ (killing) is
actually going on."

The state’s easement programs
help offset the costs of regulations for small forest landowners.
But convincing landowners to sign up for easements can be
difficult, especially in the face of regulatory uncertainty,
according to Peter Overton, whose family has owned a tree farm in
southern Puget Sound since 1922. Speaking at a recent meeting of
the Washington Farm Forestry Association, an advocacy group for
small forest landowners, Overton said that tree farmers don’t
want to run the risk of being "tied up in forestry (and) then
regulated out of business."

]]>No publisherWildlifeFishArticleIn the Washington woods, managers face a catch-22https://www.hcn.org/issues/298/15510
The Forests and Fish plan was supposed to help both salmon
and the timber industry in Washington State, but clauses in the
agreement may tilt it against wildlifeIn Washington state, the federal government is close to
approving a grand compromise aimed at safeguarding both imperiled
fish and timber companies. The proposal has reopened a debate,
however, over how to balance the needs of wildlife with the wants
of industry.

The so-called "Forests and Fish" plan dates
back to 1997, when Washington’s timber industry,
environmental groups and Indian tribes sat down with state and
federal agencies to rework the state’s logging rules (HCN,
4/23/01: Plan protects foresters, not fish). They were trying to
avoid the possibility of a forest shutdown caused by the listing of
wild salmon populations under the Endangered Species Act. Logging
impacts salmon because it removes trees that might otherwise fall
into streams and create fish habitat, and can clog streams with
silt.

In 1999, the stakeholders released a report
recommending new rules for building roads, spraying herbicides, and
logging around sensitive areas on Washington’s 8 million
acres of private forestland. The state Legislature accepted the
rules and told state forestry officials to roll them into a
"habitat conservation plan" (HCP) for approval by the federal
government. Habitat conservation plans allow some imperiled animals
to be killed in exchange for broad habitat protections that
presumably will save the species as a whole (HCN, 11/10/03: San
Diego’s Habitat Triage).

The state released a draft
habitat plan in December. If the Fisheries office of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA Fisheries) OKs it, the
state, and landowners who follow the state’s rules, will be
exempt from Endangered Species Act lawsuits for the next 50 years.
But as the approval deadline approaches, critics argue that the
deal contains an impossible catch-22: It allows state wildlife
managers to change the rules to reflect evolving science, but at
the same time promises timber companies that they won’t be
subject to further land-use restrictions to protect salmon: a
policy that Clinton-era Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt dubbed "no
surprises."

But no one knows what science may uncover
about the needs of wild salmon, says Peter Goldman, executive
director of the Washington Forest Law Center, an environmental
nonprofit. "There is no such thing as ‘no surprises’ in
salmon country, and the HCP has to make that very clear." Some
flexibility is built into the rules, in a process called "adaptive
management." The plan creates buffers, for example, that protect
swaths of land up to 200 feet wide around streams.
Environmentalists, and some agency biologists, are convinced that
the buffers are barely acceptable, and say that studies will
eventually call for tighter rules.

The problem, says
Goldman, is that once the plan gets federal approval, the state
will have little incentive to follow through with the science
needed for adaptive management. The state promised to complete
approximately $30 million of studies before 2010, but federal
funding for the program ends next year, so the cash-strapped state
Legislature will probably have to come up with the money.

Environmentalists want the HCP to set strict regulations from the
beginning, for things like logging on steep slopes and around small
streams. Convincing the state to change its rules has already
proven tricky: Agency scientists have completed two studies since
1999 that show that the Forests and Fish rules need to be stricter,
but the Department of Natural Resources has yet to institute any
changes.

Supporters of the plan, including the Washington
Forest Protection Association, a timber-industry organization, say
that the Forests and Fish logging rules are already some of the
strictest in the nation. Because they are designed as an HCP, they
protect not just salmon, but 49 species of unlisted fish and seven
stream amphibians. So they give small, non-salmon streams —
home of sculpins, sticklebacks, and mudminnows — much the
same protection as larger rivers and creeks.

Environmentalists, tribes and the timber industry are scrambling to
submit comments on the habitat plan before a May 12 deadline. NOAA
Fisheries is expected to release a final decision sometime this
fall.

The author writes from Lilliwaup,
Washington, where her family owns a tree
farm.
]]>No publisherWildlifeFishArticleBackbreaking work props up 'sustainable' cropshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/297/15471
California farmworkers fight for stricter regulations on
hand weeding, only to find themselves at odds with organic
farmers. In 1975, the legendary
farmworker advocate Cesar Chavez won one of his greatest victories
when he convinced the California Legislature to ban the
short-handled hoe. Workers had to stoop low to weed with the
12-inch tool, which caused them back pain and injuries. The ban was
meant to increase use of the long-handled hoe, which lets workers
chop weeds while standing. Since then, however, California
agriculture has moved in a direction few labor advocates foresaw,
and some say the protections Chavez fought so hard for are being
undermined.

In 1975, California farmers planted about as
many acres in wheat as they did in vegetables, and organic
agriculture was still the pet project of a handful of hippies and
enterprising restaurant owners. Over the next three decades,
falling crop prices, rising property values, and increased consumer
demand pushed farmers toward high-value specialty crops, such as
vegetables, fruit and ornamental flowers, grown both conventionally
and organically. By 2002, farmers planted almost three times as
much acreage in vegetables as they did in wheat.

Unlike
wheat, which can be managed and harvested mechanically, specialty
crops are often delicate and labor-intensive. Weeding those crops
is one of the most labor-intensive activities of all. For example,
spring mix salad, grown in dense mats on raised beds and
blanket-harvested with band saws, has to be weeded by hand, says
Bob Martin, general manager of Rio Farms and president of the
Monterey County Farm Bureau.

State labor law allows hand
weeding, but the work is even more backbreaking than using a
short-handled hoe. Since the early 1990s, worker advocates have
tried to convince the state Legislature to ban hand weeding, with
no success. Ironically, some of the most vocal opponents of the ban
have been organic farmers, who sell their wares for a premium to
consumers who often consider themselves ecologically and socially
responsible.

Aimee Shreck, a sociologist at the
University of California at Davis, says that to see organic farmers
fighting what labor organizations call a human rights issue "raises
some questions about the promise of the (organic) movement."

Nurturing the land, burning out
workers?

Only 1 percent to 2 percent of
California’s crops are grown organically, but ever-increasing
consumer demand makes organic farming the state’s
fastest-growing agricultural sector. In 2001, farmers in the Golden
State planted over 40,000 acres with organic vegetable crops
— about 57 percent of the country’s total organic
vegetable acreage. And because organic farmers use no traditional
pesticides or herbicides, those vegetables often require hand
weeding.

"Hand weeding is the way farmers can make a
living without pesticides," says Claudia Reid, policy director for
the California Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, a nonprofit
coalition for sustainable and socially just agriculture. Reid
guesses that 85 percent of the hand weeding in California takes
place on organic farms.

Judith Redmond, co-owner of Full
Belly Farms, an organic farm northwest of Sacramento, agrees that
the issue is "a quandary." But she says that most organic farms are
small operations that sell locally, and they’re diverse
enough so that workers don’t have to spend all day doing the
same activity.

But just because a carrot was grown
organically doesn’t mean it wasn’t mass-produced.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average size
of California’s certified organic farms more than tripled
between 1985 and 1991. In 2000, for the first time in the organic
movement’s history, more organic food was sold through
conventional supermarkets than through farmer’s markets or
food cooperatives.

"More and more of the large
corporations have been transitioning a good portion of their farms
into organic," says Ron Strochlic, a research analyst at the
California Institute for Rural Studies. And many people in the
organic industry worry that the Department of Agriculture’s
2002 National Organic Rule, which set nationwide organic standards,
will make it even easier for large-scale growers to take over the
organic market from smaller producers.

Redmond, the
organic farmer, acknowledges that if an organic farm is large and
highly specialized, the scene is set for "farmworkers (to) inch
their way down rows and rows of monocrop," and end up hand weeding
all day.

Loophole lets hand weeding
continue

In 2003, state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los
Angeles, introduced another in a long string of bills that would
ban hand weeding. The bill didn’t pass, but it was strict
enough to convince farmers that they would be better off
negotiating for regulatory change than continuing to fight in the
Legislature, says José Millan, deputy secretary of the
California Labor Agency.

The following year, farmers and
farmworkers’ groups sat down with California’s
Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board and worked out a
compromise. The board added "emergency" hand-weeding restrictions
to state labor regulations. Permanent standards should be in place
by the beginning of May, but some question whether they will solve
the problem.

Under the new rules, growers who make their
workers hand weed unnecessarily will be fined $5,000; fines for
repeat violations can reach $25,000. But growers can still use hand
weeding if there is no "reasonable alternative," as in situations
where the long-handled hoe would damage crops. Intermittent hand
weeding, defined as less than 20 percent of a laborer’s
weekly work time, is still unregulated. And the regulations do not
apply to seedlings, planter containers, high-density crops such as
spring mix — or to organic crops.

While not all
farmworker advocates are thrilled with the new rules, they say
it’s a step in the right direction, and they’ll
continue monitoring the workers’ situation.

In the
meantime, some observers say organic farmers have a real problem on
their hands: The hand-weeding debate "pits organic farmers against
farmworkers," says Strochlic at the Institute for Rural Studies,
"(which) is contradictory to the premise of sustainable
agriculture."

The author is a former
HCN intern.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryArticleEvolution of a timber familyhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/292/15312
A Northwestern family finds itself in the midst of heated
controversy over ecology and economics when it has to decide how to
manage its timber farm Every time we buy
something, we see the physical signs of our consumption in our
backyard. Paying for my recent college education, for example, took
about 300 truckloads of second-growth Douglas fir, cedar and
hemlock trees. A $60 pair of jeans equals a log of Doug fir
that’s eight inches at the top and 36 feet long. When we pay
medical bills or leave our town of 200 to go on vacation, we cut
more trees.

I grew up on the timber farm, which is owned
by some 30 members of my mother’s extended family. Some of
them work for the family company on the Olympic Peninsula,
operating chain saws and laying out clear-cuts; others work as
interior designers in Chicago or as wine importers in New York
City.

Not everyone approves of the family business. One
of my relatives, for instance, called the company’s timber
income "blood money." But for the most part, we get along and enjoy
each other when we gather in Washington to talk about log prices,
sustained yield and board footage.

A surefire bet for a
heated family debate, though, is the question of how we should
manage Grandfather’s Park, 18 acres of river bottomland that
the family removed from timber harvest in the 1970s. Homesteaders
logged the park with oxen in 1880, 20 years before my family bought
the land, so it’s not the "virgin" old growth visitors often
mistake it for. But now the trees are huge again — covered in
moss, footed with sword fern and, when it’s sunny, lit by
golden-green light.

For decades, my uncle, the
farm’s current manager, harvested a load or two of dead and
dying trees from the park each year, which earned us about $2,000 a
load. But this year, some family members got together and
petitioned to stop any logging of the old trees. Immediately,
another group formed, and it argued that ending salvage logging in
the park would be a symbolic first step toward destroying our
timber company.

The debate wasn’t over ecology and
economics but about underlying philosophies — whether or not
it made us "better" people to stop the salvage logging. But this
wasn’t a philosophical exercise. The argument began through
mass e-mails and quickly became ugly and personal, sprinkled with
decades-old quotes dredged up from the family’s collective
memory. During the meeting, the anti-loggers shed tears and made
emotional speeches, while other family members signed petitions,
conducted biased surveys, sat in awkward silence and occasionally
shouted. I mostly listened.

The people who wanted to stop
salvage logging accused their opponents of being greedy,
out-of-touch and totalitarian. The pro-salvage logging team
retorted that the "greeners" were wealthy, out-of-touch and
manipulative.

Each side resorted to clichés. The
"environmentalist" cousins acted as if a human presence
automatically ruined a forest; the "anti-environmentalist" group
acted as if trees were only good for human consumption.

I
know that neither group is actually that narrow-minded, but both
were afraid that any compromise would lead to total surrender. In
the end, however, there simply weren’t enough stakeholders
for this to become the never-ending battle that it is with the
Forest Service.

After a couple of hours, the people in my
mother’s generation put together what was generally
considered to be a win-win resolution. They created a park
committee, consisting of two moderate representatives from each
camp, which will be in charge of deciding when and how we
salvage-log. I think it’s a face-saver more than anything.
Grandfather’s Park is still open to salvage logging, but it
may be years — if ever — before the next load of dying
trees is taken out.

While it was painful to watch my
family argue, the meeting wasn’t discouraging. Most of the
young people at the meeting saw past the hullabaloo and agreed with
both points of view. It might just be because we’re younger.
Maybe as you age you simplify the world around you in order to stay
sane. Or maybe we chose the middle path simply because we
didn’t want to offend anyone.

I prefer to think
that my 20-something generation learned something from our parents.
I prefer to think of us as "green loggers" who have moved beyond
the black-and-white environmental vision that’s been passed
down to us. Most of all, I hope that when the time comes for us to
call the shots, we’ll be able to trust each other.

Lissa James is a contributor to Writers on the Range. She
just concluded an internship with High Country
News and is back in Washington, working in the family
business.

]]>No publisherWildlifeEssaysArticleWildlife refuge may still be radioactivehttps://www.hcn.org/issues/291/15263
Scientists may have found a radioactive "hot spot" at the
former Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant near Denver, soon to be
home to a wildlife refuge But in September, Kaiser-Hill discovered a 30-acre plot
in the northern buffer zone with a radioactivity level that was 120
times higher than expected, although still well below the limit set
for the refuge. Now, Kaiser-Hill and the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency are re-sampling the plot to see if the hot spot
was merely the result of a lab error.

Others aren’t so sure about the safety
of the buffer zone. "Plutonium remains dangerous for a quarter of a
million years," says LeRoy Moore, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain
Peace and Justice Center. "We have no idea what human and natural
events are going to disturb the land."

The Fish and
Wildlife Service expects to finalize the Rocky Flats management
plan early this year.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryArticleGraves halt a highway projecthttps://www.hcn.org/issues/290/15227
An ambitious highway construction project has been put on
hold in Port Angeles, Wash., following the discovery of the
state’s largest prehistoric village To
repair the 40-year-old Hood Canal Bridge, which connects the cities
of the northern Olympic Peninsula with the Seattle area, the
Washington State Department of Transportation needed to build
floating concrete pontoons. For a construction site, it chose an
abandoned lumber mill in the sheltered harbor of Port Angeles.

The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe knew that there had once
been a tribal village on the harbor, but preliminary excavations at
the abandoned mill failed to find any evidence of the prehistoric
site. Within a few weeks, though, construction work uncovered a
1,700-year-old village containing eight longhouses and over 5,000
artifacts, and a cemetery with 264 intact human skeletons. "Day by
day, the evidence of the village (was) being destroyed," says
tribal chairwoman Frances Charles.

On Dec. 21, the state,
under pressure from the tribe, halted construction at the mill
site. Completion of the bridge project has been delayed
indefinitely while the state looks for another location.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesArticleSeattle's rural neighbors rise uphttps://www.hcn.org/issues/290/15226
Inspired by Oregon’s Measure 37, a private-property
rights group in King County, Wash., is fighting to repeal recently
adopted land-use ordinances In
October, the Democrat-led county council adopted new land-use
ordinances meant to protect "critical areas," such as wetlands and
wildlife habitat. The regulations require rural property owners to
leave streamside buffers, and 50 to 65 percent of their land,
undeveloped. Existing agricultural land is exempt, as is commercial
timberland.

In response, the Citizens’ Alliance for
Property Rights, a landowners’ group, collected about 51,000
signatures for three ballot initiatives that would repeal the
ordinances. King County and environmental groups took the
initiatives to court, where a county judge ruled that state law
prevents citizens from using referendums to overturn local land-use
rules written to comply with the state’s Growth Management
Act.

The Citizens’ Alliance has vowed to appeal the
decision to the state Supreme Court, but Tim Trohimovich, planning
director for the environmental group 1,000 Friends of Washington,
points out that the Supreme Court has already ruled on the issue
— in favor of land-use rules.

Meanwhile, the
Pacific Legal Foundation, a property-rights group, is preparing a
lawsuit against the county. And county council member Kathy
Lambert, R, who, along with the council’s other Republican
members, voted against the ordinances, says the fight is far from
over: "They may have woken up a sleeping giant."

]]>No publisherCommunitiesArticleThe Utah backcountry gets crowdedhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/290/15225
Cross-country skiers and environmentalists clash with a
heli-skiing company over use of the Tri-Canyon area in Utah’s
Wasatch Mountains The Tri-Canyon area, formed by
Mill Creek Canyon and Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons, is the
center of backcountry skiing in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. But
Alexis Kelner, co-author of the backcountry ski guide
Wasatch Tours, thinks it’s gone to pot. As
the understated Kelner puts it, the Tri-Canyon area, a 30-minute
drive from Salt Lake City, is no longer a "pleasant" place to ski.

Kelner began skiing in the Wasatch in 1957, back when he
says it felt like only 20 people hiked into the canyons to find
untracked powder snow. Those days are long gone. From 1950 to 2000,
the population of Salt Lake City almost quadrupled, to 1.6 million
people. In 2003, the Wasatch-Cache National Forest was the fifth
most heavily used national forest in the country. Most of the
winter use is concentrated in the Tri-Canyon area, with its
world-class snow, easily accessible backcountry, and four ski
resorts: Alta, Snowbird, Brighton and Solitude.

But the
same qualities that make the area popular with backcountry skiers
make it essential to the heli-skiing company Wasatch Powderbird
Guides, which charges each of its clients $770 a day for helicopter
lifts to the top of the slopes. The company’s use of
avalanche-control explosives, the drone of its rotors, and the
fields of tracked-up snow left behind cause wildlife enthusiasts,
and many backcountry skiers, to complain that the backcountry is
being sacrificed to commercial recreation.

Heli-skiers
make up only 2 percent of total backcountry users, but they have a
much larger impact than anyone else, according to the environmental
group Save Our Canyons. The group has led a decades-long fight to
preserve the silence and untracked powder in the central Wasatch.
The conflict has forced the Forest Service to get creative with
dividing up access to the backcountry.

In its 31 years of
operation, Wasatch Powderbird Guides has been slowly hemmed in. The
1984 Utah Wilderness Act put large chunks of the lower Tri-Canyon
off-limits. In 1999, the Forest Service created a half-mile no-fly
zone around occupied golden eagle nests, and closed the Tri-Canyon
area to heli-skiing on Sundays and Mondays.

But some
skiers and environmentalists say these restrictions have only
increased conflict. According to a Forest Service study, the
Sunday-Monday closure caused an 18 percent increase in
Powderbird’s Saturday use of the Tri-Canyon area. "This is
Utah," says Rusty Dassing, who has worked as a Powderbird guide for
20 years. "People are more likely to recreate on Saturdays."

So when the company’s five-year permit came up for
renewal last November, Powderbird asked the Forest Service to
replace the fixed closure with an annual cap of 10 to 15 weekend
days. This would reduce backcountry conflict, according to the
company, because it would remove Powderbird’s incentive to
use the Tri-Canyon area every Saturday. Instead, weekend use would
be spread out over the season.

The Forest Service
initially considered adopting Powderbird’s suggestions, but
many locals, who liked having predictable heli-free days, objected.
In the new five-year permit, the Forest Service decided to retain
many of the old conditions, including the Sunday-Monday closure. In
an attempt to reduce Saturday congestion, however, the new permit
allows Powderbird to exchange three Saturdays for three Mondays
each season. Lisa Smith, executive director of Save Our Canyons,
says the permit "isn’t as bad as it could have been." But she
says her group is going to challenge the permit with an
administrative appeal, on the grounds that it doesn’t do
enough to protect golden eagles.

Dassing, meanwhile, says
the 10- to 15-day cap "would have significantly reduced our impact
on others. It would have given us the flexibility to avoid other
people."

If the Forest Service’s decision is
upheld, it will be another five years before the issue can be
revisited.

Loren Kroenke, district ranger for the Salt
Lake Ranger District, calls the conflict "symptomatic of
what’s going on across the West, although a little more
compressed." The Census Bureau predicts the population of the Salt
Lake region to balloon from 1.6 to 2.7 million by the year 2020.

Meanwhile, longtime backcountry skier Kelner says
he’s given up on the Tri-Canyon area. Now, he skis in the
southern Wasatch, or farther east, in the Uinta Mountains. And
Wasatch Powderbird Guides has expanded overseas, offering
heli-skiing in places like Greenland and New Zealand.

]]>No publisherRecreationArticleMy jeans grow on treeshttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/15207
The writer listens to heated arguments about logging the
extended family’s oldest and most valuable trees My family owns a timber
company in Washington state, and for us, money grows on trees.

Every time we buy something, we see the physical signs of
our consumption in our backyard. Paying for my recent college
education, for example, took about 300 log truckloads of
second-growth Douglas fir, cedar and hemlock trees. A $60 pair of
jeans equals a log of doug fir that's eight inches at the top and
36 feet long. When we pay medical bills or leave our town of 200 to
go on vacation, we cut more trees.

I grew up on the
timber farm, which is owned by some 30 members of my mother's
extended family. Some of them work for the family company on the
Olympic Peninsula, operating chain saws and laying out clear-cuts;
others work as interior designers in Chicago or as wine importers
in New York City.

Not everyone approves of the family
business. One of my relatives, for instance, called the company's
timber income "blood money." But for the most part we get along and
enjoy each other when we gather in Washington to talk about log
prices, sustained yield and board footage.

A surefire bet
for a heated family debate, though, is the question of how we
should manage Grandfather's Park, 18 acres of river bottomland that
the family removed from timber harvest in the 1970s. Homesteaders
logged the park with oxen in 1880, 20 years before my family bought
the land, so it's not the "virgin" old growth visitors often
mistake it for. But now the trees are huge again — covered in
moss, footed with sword fern and, when it's sunny, lit by
golden-green light.

For decades, my uncle, the farm's
current manager, harvested a load or two of dead and dying trees
from the park each year, which earns us about $2,000 a load. But
this year, some family members got together and petitioned to stop
any logging of the old trees. Immediately, another group formed,
and it argued that ending salvage logging in the park would be a
symbolic first step towards destroying our timber company.

The debate wasn't over ecology and economics but about
underlying philosophies — whether or not it made us "better"
people to stop the salvage logging. But this wasn't a philosophical
exercise. The argument began through mass emails and quickly became
ugly and personal, sprinkled with decades-old quotes dredged up
from the family's collective memory. During the meeting the
anti-loggers shed tears and made emotional speeches, while other
family members signed petitions, conducted biased surveys, sat in
awkward silence and occasionally shouted. I mostly listened.

The people who wanted to stop salvage logging accused
their opponents of being greedy, out-of-touch and totalitarian. The
pro-salvage logging team retorted that the "greeners" were wealthy,
out-of-touch and manipulative.

Each side resorted to
cliches. The "environmentalist" cousins acted as if a human
presence automatically ruined a forest; the "anti-environmentalist"
group acted as if trees were only good for human consumption.

I know that neither group is actually that narrow-minded.
But they were both afraid that any compromise would lead to total
surrender. In the end, however, there simply weren't enough
stakeholders for this to be a never-ending battle, as it is with
the Forest Service.

After a couple of hours, the people
in my mother's generation put together what was generally
considered to be a win-win resolution. They created a park
committee, consisting of two moderate representatives from both
camps, which will be in charge of deciding when and how we
salvage-log. I think it's a face-saver more than anything.
Grandfather's Park is still open to salvage logging, but it may be
years — if ever — before the next load of dying trees
is taken out.

While it was painful and depressing to
watch my family argue, the meeting wasn't discouraging. Most of the
young people at the meeting saw past the hullabaloo and agreed with
both points of view. It might just be because we're younger. Maybe
as you age you simplify the world around you in order to stay sane.
Or maybe we chose the middle path simply because we didn't want to
offend anyone.

I prefer to think that my 20-something
generation learned something from our parents. I prefer to think of
us as "green loggers" who have moved beyond the black-and-white
environmental vision that's been passed down to us. Most of all, I
hope that when the time comes for us to call the shots, we’ll
be able to trust each other.

Lissa James is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado. She just concluded an
internship with the paper and is heading back to Washington to work
in the family business.